Night Train to Lisbon Read online

  A bell rang, it must have been the signal for supper. A trace of irritation hovered over the priest’s face. He flung the blanket off his legs, went to the door and locked it. Back in his chair, he reached for the light switch and turned off the lamp. A cart dragging crockery rolled through the corridor. Father Bartolomeu waited until it was silent again before he went on.

  ‘Or perhaps I do know something, or imagine it. That is, a good year before his death, Amadeu suddenly arrived at my door in the middle of the night. All his self-confidence was gone. His features were agitated and so were his breath and his movements. I made tea and he smiled fleetingly when I brought out the biscuits he had been crazy about as a student. Then the tormented expression reappeared on his face.

  ‘Clearly I couldn’t press him, couldn’t even ask anything. I remained silent and waited. He was struggling with himself as only he could: as if victory and defeat in this struggle would decide life and death. And perhaps it was really so. I had heard rumours that he was working for the Resistance. As he gazed straight ahead, breathing with an effort, I considered what growing old had done to him: the first age spots on the slim hands, the weary skin under the sleepless eyes, the grey strands in the hair. And suddenly, I saw with horror that he looked neglected. Not like a tramp. The neglect was less apparent than that: the untended beard, little hairs growing out of his ears and nose, carelessly cut fingernails, a yellowish sheen on the white tie, unpolished shoes. As if he hadn’t been home for days. And there was an irregular twitch of the eyelids that looked like the consequence of a lifelong strain.

  ‘“One life for many lives. You can’t calculate like that. Can you?” Amadeu spoke in a strained voice, and behind the words were both outrage and the fear of doing something wrong, something unforgivable.

  ‘“You know what I think about that,” I said. “I haven’t changed my mind since then.”

  ‘“And if it were really many?”

  ‘“Do you have to do it?”

  ‘“On the contrary, I have to prevent it.”

  ‘“He knows too much?”

  ‘“She. She’s become a danger. She wouldn’t hold out. She would talk. The others think so.”

  ‘“Jorge too?” It was a shot in the dark and it hit home.

  ‘“I don’t want to talk about that.”

  ‘Silent minutes passed. The tea grew cold. It was tearing him up. Did he love her? Or was it simply because she was a human being?

  ‘“What’s her name? Names are the invisible shadows with which others clothe us and we them. Do you remember?”’

  ‘Those were his own words in one of the many remarks he had amazed us all with.

  ‘For a brief moment, the memory freed him and he smiled.

  ‘“Estefânia Espinhosa. A name like a poem, isn’t it?”

  ‘“How will you do it?”

  ‘“Over the border. Into the mountains. Don’t ask me where.”

  ‘He disappeared through a garden gate and that was the last time I saw him alive.

  ‘After what happened in the cemetery, I kept thinking about this nocturnal conversation. Was the woman Estefânia Espinhosa? Had she come from Spain, where she had heard the news of Amadeu’s death? And when she walked towards O’Kelly, was she walking towards the man who had wanted to sacrifice her? Did they stand, not moving and not looking at each other, at the grave of the man who had sacrificed a lifelong friendship to save the woman with the poetic name?’

  Father Bartolomeu turned on the light. Gregorius stood up.

  ‘Wait,’ said the priest. ‘Now that I have told you all these things, you should also read this.’ And from a bookcase, he took an ancient folder, held together by faded ribbons. ‘You’re a classical philologist, you can read this. It’s a copy of Amadeu’s speech at the graduation ceremony. He made it especially for me. Latin. Magnificent. Unbelievable. You saw the lectern in the auditorium, you say. He delivered it right there.

  ‘We were prepared for something special, but nothing like this. From the first sentence, a breathless silence prevailed. And it became more silent and more breathless, this silence. The sentences from the pen of a seventeen-year-old iconoclast, who spoke as if he had already lived a whole life, were like whiplashes. I began to ask myself what would happen when the last word had been spoken. I was afraid. Afraid for this thin-skinned adventurer who knew what he was doing and yet didn’t know, whose vulnerability was every bit equal to his verbal force. But also afraid for those of us who might not be up to it. The teachers sat there very stiff, very straight. Some had shut their eyes and seemed to be busy erecting a protective wall internally against this barrage of blasphemous accusations, a bulwark against a blasphemy that wouldn’t have been thought possible in this room. Would they still talk to him? Would they resist the temptation to defend themselves with a condescension that turned him back into a child?

  ‘The last sentence, you’ll see, contains a threat, touching and frightening, for you imagined a volcano behind it spitting fire, and if it didn’t, it might be destroyed by its own fervour. Amadeu didn’t utter it loudly or with clenched fists, this sentence, but softly, almost gently, and to this day I don’t know if it was a deliberate ploy to increase its effectiveness, after the firm tone in which he had delivered the bold, ruthless sentences, or if he had suddenly lost his nerve and, with the gentleness in his voice, wanted to ask for forgiveness in advance.

  ‘The last word was spoken. Nobody moved. Amadeu straightened the sheets of paper, slowly, his eyes aimed at the lectern. Now there was nothing more for him to do, absolutely nothing. But you can’t leave the lectern after such a speech without the audience taking sides in some sense. It would be a defeat of the worst sort: as if you hadn’t said anything at all.

  ‘I felt like standing up and applauding. If only because of the brilliance of this daredevil speech. But then I thought: you can’t applaud blasphemy, polished as it may be. No one can, least of all a priest, a man of God. And so I remained sitting. The seconds passed. The silence couldn’t have lasted much longer, otherwise it would be a catastrophe, for him as well as for us. Amadeu raised his head and stretched his back. His glance went to the stained-glass window and stayed there. It wasn’t intentional, no dramatic trick, I’m sure of that. It was completely instinctive and illustrated, as you will see, his speech. It showed that he was his speech.

  ‘Maybe that was enough to break the ice. But then something happened that seemed to everyone in the hall like a joking proof of God’s existence: a dog started barking outside. At first, it was a short, dry bark that scolded us for our petty, humourless silence; then it turned into a long-drawn-out wail, as if echoing the misery of the whole occasion.

  ‘Jorge O’Kelly burst out laughing, and after a second of fear, others followed him. I think that Amadeu was taken aback for a moment; humour was the last thing he had counted on. But it was Jorge who had started, so it had to be all right. The smile that appeared on Amadeu’s face was a little forced, but it lasted, and as other dogs now joined in the wailing, he left the lectern.

  ‘Only now did Senhor Cortês, the Rector, wake up from his paralysis. He stood up, went to Amadeu and shook his hand. Does a handshake show if a person is glad to know that it will be the last? Senhor Cortês said a few words to Amadeu, which were drowned out by the dogs’ wailing. Amadeu answered, and as he spoke, he recovered his self-confidence; you could see that in his movements as he shoved the scandalous manuscript into the pocket of his frock coat as if stowing something precious in a safe place. Finally, he bent his head, looked the Rector straight in the eye, and turned to the door where Jorge was waiting for him. O’Kelly put his arm around his shoulders and pushed him out.

  ‘Later, I saw the two of them in the park. Jorge was talking and gesticulating, Amadeu was listening. The pair of them reminded me of a trainer going over a fight with his protégé. Then Maria João came up. Jorge touched his friend on the shoulders with both hands and pushed him, laughing, towards the girl.

&nbs
p; ‘The teachers hardly mentioned the speech afterwards. I wouldn’t say that it was hushed up. Rather it was that we didn’t find the words or the tone to exchange views about it. And maybe many were also glad about the unbearable heat that day. It meant we didn’t have to say: “Impossible!” or “There may be some truth in it.” Instead we could say: “What a scorcher!”’

  19

  How could it be, thought Gregorius, that he was riding in the hundred-year-old tram through the Lisbon evening with the feeling that he was departing, thirty-eight years too late, for Isfahan? He had got out on the way back from Father Bartolomeu and collected the dramas of Aeschylus and the poems of Horace from the bookshop. Then, as he walked to the hotel, something had bothered him and his steps became slower and more hesitant. For some minutes, he was assailed by the repulsive smell of rancid chicken fat from a street vendor near by. Despite this it had seemed enormously important to stand still now and find out what was troubling him. Had he ever before tried so intensely to understand himself?

  Outside he was wide awake, but not yet inside. It sounded like something quite obvious when Father Bartolomeu had said that about Prado. As if every grown-up knew about inside and outside alertness. Português. Gregorius had pictured the Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke leaning on the ledge with outstretched arms, her heels sliding out of her shoes. Estefânia Espinhosa. A name like a poem, Prado had said. Over the border. Into the mountains. Don’t ask me where. And then, suddenly, without understanding how it happened, Gregorius knew what he had felt in himself without realizing: it: he didn’t want to read Prado’s speech in the hotel room, but in the abandoned Liceu, where he had delivered it. There, where the Hebrew Bible lay in the drawer on his sweater. There, with rats and bats.

  Why did he feel so strongly that it would have far-reaching consequences if, instead of going on to the hotel, he retraced his steps to the Liceu? Shortly before it closed, he had slipped into a hardware shop and bought the the most powerful torch they had. And now he sat again in one of the old trams and rattled to the underground that would take him out to the Liceu.

  When he had decided to return there, Gregorius had in his mind’s eye the cone of sunlight that had strayed into Senhor Cortês’s office at noon. In the darkness of early evening the school building lay silent like a sunken ship at the bottom of the sea.

  He sat down on a bench and thought of the student who had broken into the Bern Gymnasium at night a long time ago, and from the Rector’s office had made phone calls all over the world costing thousands of francs, out of revenge. Hans Gmür was his name and he answered to it with defiance. Gregorius had paid the bill and persuaded Kägi not to press charges. He had met with Gmür in town and tried to find out what he wanted to avenge. It didn’t work. ‘Just revenge,’ the boy simply kept saying. He looked exhausted behind his apple cake and seemed consumed by a resentment as old as himself. When they parted, Gregorius had watched him as he walked away. Somehow, he admired Gmür a little, he later told Florence, or at least envied him.

  ‘Just imagine: he sits in the dark at Kägi’s desk and calls Sydney, Belém, Santiago, even Peking. Always the embassies where they speak German. He has nothing to say, absolutely nothing. He simply wants to hear the open line buzz and feel the sinfully expensive seconds pass. Rather splendid, isn’t it?’

  ‘And you of all people say that? A man who would like to pay his bills even before they arrive? And not owe anybody anything?’

  ‘Exactly,’ he had said. ‘Exactly.’

  Florence had adjusted her ultra-stylish glasses, as she always did when he said such things.

  Now Gregorius switched on the torch and followed the beam of light to the entrance of the Liceu. In the dark, the creaking of the door sounded much louder than it had in the daytime, and it also made him sound much more like an intruder. The noise of startled bats flooded through the building. Gregorius waited until it had subsided before he went through the swing door to the ground floor. He swept the light like a broom over the stone floor of the corridor, to avoid stepping on a dead rat. It was chilly here at this time of day and he went first to the Rector’s office to get his sweater.

  He looked at the Hebrew Bible. It had belonged to Father Bartolomeu. In 1970, when the Liceu was closed as a hotbed of communists, the priest and Senhor Cortês’s successor had stood in the Rector’s empty office, furious and impotent. ‘We needed to do something, something symbolic,’ the priest had said. And so he had left his Bible in the desk drawer. The Rector had looked at him and grinned. ‘Perfect. The Lord will get them,’ he had said.

  Gregorius sat down in the auditorium on the bench reserved for the school staff, where Senhor Cortês had listened to Prado’s speech with a stony expression. He took Father Bartolomeu’s folder out of the bookshop bag, removed the bands and unfolded the sheets which Amadeu had straightened on the lectern after the speech, enveloped in embarrassed, horrified silence. It was written in the same black ink he had seen on the letter Prado had sent to Mélodie from Oxford. Gregorius aimed the beam of the torch at the shimmering yellowish paper and began to read.

  REVERENCE AND LOATHING FOR THE WORD OF GOD

  I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need them against the vulgarity of the world. I want to look up at the illuminated church windows and let myself be blinded by the unearthly colours. I need their lustre: I need it against the dirty colours of the uniforms. I want to let myself be wrapped in the austere coolness of the churches. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal tones. I need it against the shrill farce of marches. I love praying people. I need the sight of them. I need it against the malicious poison of the superficial and the thoughtless. I want to read the powerful words of the Bible. I need the unreal force of their poetry. I need it against the dilapidation of the language and the dictatorship of slogans. A world without these things would be a world I would not like to live in.

  But there is also another world I don’t want to live in: the world where the body and independent thought are disparaged, and the best things we can experience are denounced as sins. The world that demands love of tyrants, slavemasters, and cutthroats, whether their brutal boot steps reverberate through the streets with a deafening echo or they slink with feline silence like cowardly shadows through the streets and pierce their victims in the heart with flashing steel. What is most absurd is that people are exhorted from the pulpit to forgive such creatures and even to love them. Even if someone really could do it: it would mean an unparalleled dishonesty and merciless self-denial whose cost would be total deformity. This commandment, this crazy, perverse commandment to love your enemy is apt to break people, to rob them of all courage and self-confidence and to make them supple in the hands of the tyrants so they won’t find the strength to stand up to them, with weapons, if necessary.

  I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the luminosity of the words and the violent verbal subjugation by a complacent God. The hatred is a difficult hatred for how can you allow yourself to hate words that are part of the melody of life in this part of the world? Words that taught us early on what reverence is? Words that were like a beacon to us when we began to feel that the visible life can’t be all of life? Words without which we wouldn’t be what we are?

  But let us not forget: These are the same words that call on Abraham to slaughter his own son like an animal. What do we do with our rage when we read that? What should we think of such a God? A God who blames Job for arguing with Him, he who knows and understands nothing? Who, after all, was it who created him like that? And why is it less unjust if God hurls someone into misery for no reason than if a common mortal does? In fact, isn’t Job’s complaint perfectly justified?

  The
poetry of the divine words is so overwhelming that it silences everything and every protest becomes wretched yapping. That’s why you can’t just put away the Bible, but must throw it away when you have enough of its unreasonable demands and of the slavery it inflicts on us. It is a joyless God far from life speaking out of it, a God who wants to constrict the enormous compass of a human life – the big circle that can be drawn when it is left free – to the single, shrunken point of obedience. Grief ridden and sin laden, parched with subjugation and the indignity of confession, with the cross of ashes on our forehead, we are to go to the grave in the thousandfold refuted hope of a better life at His Side. But how could it be better on the side of One who just robbed us of all joy and freedom?

  And yet they are bewitchingly beautiful, the words that come from Him and go to Him. How I loved them as an altar boy! How drunk they made me in the glow of the altar candles! How clear, how evident it seemed that these words were the measure of all things! How incomprehensible it seemed to me that other words were also important to people, every one of them could mean only damnable dissipation and the loss of the essential! Even today I stand still when I hear a Gregorian chant and for an idle moment I am sad that the old drunkenness has been wiped out irrevocably by rebellion. A rebellion that shot up in me like a flame the first time I heard these two words: sacrificium intellectus.

  How are we to be happy without curiosity, without questions, doubt and arguments? Without joy in thinking? The two words, like a sword-stroke cutting off our head, they mean nothing less than a demand to live our feelings and acts against our thinking, they are the summons to a complete split, the order to sacrifice what is the core of our happiness: the internal unity and coherence of our life. The slave in the galley is chained, but he can think what he wants. But what He, our God, demands of us is that we force our slavery into our depths with our own hands and do it willingly and joyfully. Can there be a greater mockery?